Enhancing Air Quality Forecasting: A Novel Spatio-Temporal Model Integrating Graph Convolution and Multi-Head Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Forecasting air quality plays a crucial role in preventing and controlling air pollution. It is particularly significant for improving preparedness for heavily polluted weather conditions and ensuring the health and safety of the population. In this study, a novel deep learning model for predicting air quality spatio-temporal variations is introduced. The model, named graph long short-term memory with multi-head attention (GLSTMMA), is designed to capture the temporal patterns and spatial relationships within multivariate time series data related to air quality. The GLSTMMA model utilizes a hybrid neural network architecture to effectively learn the complex dependencies and correlations present in the data. The extraction of spatial features related to air quality involves the utilization of a graph convolutional network (GCN) to collect air quality data based on the geographical distribution of monitoring sites. The resulting graph structure is imported into a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to establish a Graph LSTM unit, facilitating the extraction of temporal dependencies in air quality. Leveraging a Graph LSTM unit, an encoder-multiple-attention decoder framework is formulated to enable a more profound and efficient exploration of spatio-temporal correlation features within air quality time series data. The research utilizes the 2019–2021 multi-source air quality dataset of Qinghai Province for experimental assessment. The results indicate that the model effectively leverages the impact of multi-source data, resulting in optimal accuracy in predicting six air pollutants.